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Visual Studio "14" CTP2 Adds ASP.NET and IDE Features

The release of the second CTP for Visual Studio “14” includes several notable features, which while not earthshaking should provide some usability enhancements in various parts of the editor. First up is a layout editor that allows for the placement of the IDE’s tool windows to be saved and loaded. If you have customized your layout to maximize a particular workflow, it is now possible to recall these on a case-by-case basis without spending clicks to reorganize. The first nine such layouts are associated with the keyboard shortcuts CTRL+ALT+1 to CTRL+ATL+9.

The editor window itself receives touch support, meaning that familiar touch commands such as pinching, selection, and scrolling are now possible. VS2012 and VS2013 previously received updates to make the ALL CAPS text of the menus configurable, and now with CTP2 “14” has switched to Title Caps.

Another inclusion for CTP2 is the presence of the Lightbulb icon in the editor window. When code contains errors, hovering over the red squiggle line in the editor will cause the Lightbulb menu to appear, which will present several suggested options to fix the error. Along with these options is a brief preview window to provide an example of how the suggestion would look in your code if chosen.

Developers looking to explore ASP.NET vNext will find the latest version of this codebase installed with CTP2. This release syncs “14” with the ASP.NET and web programming features contained in VS2013’s Update 2. CTP2 is shipping with an older version of the Entity Framework 6 Runtime, so fixes present in EF 6.1.0 and 6.1.1 are not present. The release of the CTP is intended to ship with EF 6.1.1. For more details on the EF contained with CTP2, refer to this recent announcement by Microsoft’s Rowan Miller.

C++ Developers should benefit from the editor enhancements, “Implement Pure Virtuals”, and the Move Function Definition that allows function definitions to be moved between source or header files.

As Brian Harry notes, this development builds of “14” are available on Azure. This means you can quickly create a Windows Server 2012R2 VM preloaded with “14” CTP2. Once it has spun up you can check the new features first hand, without polluting your primary environment or setting up a separate machine. As with CTP1, “14” should not be used in a production environment or expected to work safely when installed side-by-side with VS2013.

For more details on this release, consult the Knowledge Base article which contains all of the release notes for the CTPs provided for “14”.